ipl-logo

The Role Of Her Husband In The Yellow Wallpaper

366 Words2 Pages
Throughout the story the readers see a woman who suffers a certain type of disorder, in which her husband is her caretaker throughout the whole story. She starts to fascinate on the wallpaper in her room and begins to imagine that there are creepers in the wallpaper. However, at the end she feels the woman who has been creeping is she herself. This story symbolizes her journey of always being captive by either her husband’s doctor or her husband’s sister that seems to act in the story as her housekeeper or nurse. She was never able to live a life she desires. She was always being told what to do and how to live. That is until she “escapes the wallpaper” and sets herself free from her husband. "I've got out at last," said I, "despite you and
Show More
Related
588 Words | 3 Pages

She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

Read More
775 Words | 4 Pages

As the narrator becomes more fascinated with the wallpaper she moves progressively away from her normal day-to-day routines and lifestyle. When the narrator finally recognizes herself as the woman trapped in the wallpaper she screams at her husband "I 've got out at last," (Gilman 656) "you can 't put me back" (Gilman 656). She realizes woman are forced to hide behind the internal patterns of their lives and they need that she needs to be

Read More
1002 Words | 5 Pages

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”(Gilman 244). The narrator describes herself becoming part of an inanimate object and escaping her confinement. When she becomes depressed after giving birth to her child, the narrator has strict orders to follow in order to “make her better.” As she follows the doctor’s commands and isolates herself from everyone and everything she loved, she loses her mental stability.

Read More
737 Words | 3 Pages

A Husband’s Control: Women Must Defer to Her Husband in All Matters of Marriage and Obedience As the narrator introduces her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the reader goes back in where a women is considered fragile in her mind and naïve to the world around them. The narrative depicts a woman’s strife while personally suffering “nervous depression” (376) and how such a malady happened to be treated by her attending physician, whom is also her husband by the name of John. In 1899, polite society dictated and observed propriety at all times therefore, wives and unmarried ladies were expected to defer to their husband or the oldest living male family member within the residence.

Read More
581 Words | 3 Pages

As she understands that the women trapped in the wallpaper is a reflection of herself she free herself mentally. Resulting in her going

Read More
749 Words | 3 Pages

The main character is quiet, always following orders during the day, but at night she creeps; creeps on to the very edge of the wallpaper to converse with the women trapped inside, for "by daylight, she is subdued" (245). The protagonist in "The Yellow Wallpaper" thoroughly describes how the absence of light changes the paper, claiming "it changes as the light changes" (244) though it is only her perception of it that is distorted. There is a quality to the wallpaper that disturbs her inner being, "things in that paper that nobody knows"

Read More
2414 Words | 10 Pages

The text includes themes of insanity, patriarchal control, women's repression, and control, which the author, Perkins, expressed in her text as a way to inform the reader of the societal and patrilocal impacts they were having on women. The narrator is married to a physician named John, who tells her that they have a sickness that can be cured by being forbidden to do any “work” until they are well again. Despite being told not to “work”, the narrator writes a diary with their thoughts throughout the days describing their opinion of the nursery room, with the entries going with the narrator describing a woman in the wallpaper attempting to escape and they try to help by peeling the wallpaper off only to see multiple women creeping around resorting to tearing the wallpaper anyway possible; biting or tearing until John arrives and faints due to the shock of the state of his wife. A passage describes the unequal relationship that the narrator and John have, with the narrator explicitly stating that they don’t feel sick only to be laughed at by John, saying “John laughs at me, of course, one expects that in marriage”, with this line going into the societal views which go into the superego of a person. The superego is a preconscious activity that follows the ideals and morals a person may have, with this case going into the societal views during the Progressive era where the patriarchy views women as being acquiescent to the men in their relationships.

Read More
1232 Words | 5 Pages

As this progresses, the woman starts to go mad from ignorance and starts to believe there is someone behind the Wallpaper. In her room, the narrator starts to obsess over the Wallpaper. The Wallpaper symbolizes women starting to realize how unfair they were treated and how responded to this. As the women’s illness keeps getting subdued by her husband, she starts to go mad and the wallpaper demonstrates this. In the third entry of her diary she says, “Of

Read More
1480 Words | 6 Pages

She begins to see strangles heads in the wallpaper, which can be a symbolic representation of the patriarchal order that stifled women. The bars on the wallpaper that cage the imaginary women are a reflection of her own situation where she is confined in the old mansion. Even the smell of the wallpaper, which she describes as being ‘yellow’ and present throughout the house, is a reflection of the mental repression that is always present in her life. She is so consumed by the smell that she thinks about burning the old mansion just to cover it

Read More
797 Words | 4 Pages

She becomes obsessed with the patterns of the wallpaper, but she mainly notices a woman that she thinks is trying to free herself from the confines of the wall. During the day this woman is still, but when night time comes around, it seems as though the woman creeps around. Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a breakdown and thinks that she is this woman inside of the wallpaper, and begins to perform similar actions like creeping around. This meaning of this scene is simple cause and effect. Not only did she already have postpartum depression, but she is basically trapped in this house for a whole summer with nothing to do so she can heal.

Read More
814 Words | 4 Pages

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story. It’s clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator’s point of view greatly differs from that of her husband’s and other family in her life.

Read More
648 Words | 3 Pages

She begins to slip away from reality and into her dreamlike world. The woman seen in the wallpaper mirrors the narrator 's plight for freedom. While she is free from the restraints of marriage and motherhood, she has been consumed by madness. John dominates the relationship, both as doctor and husband.

Read More
1155 Words | 5 Pages

Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.

Read More
501 Words | 3 Pages

By the end of the story the narrator was incredibly disassociated and has convinced herself that she freed herself from the wallpaper by tearing it off of the wall and that she shall be able to creep around the house no matter what John and Jennie try to do to "put her back in the wallpaper". She believes she has won her freedom, when she has only imprisoned herself inside of her own

Read More
484 Words | 2 Pages

The woman was obsessed with the wallpaper she begins to hallucinate that something was creeping on her. She had locked herself in the room and would not let anyone in the bedroom with her because she was trying to trap the creeper that she thought she saw. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” say,“‘Open the door, my darling!’ , ‘I can’t,’ said I. ‘ The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf’”

Read More

More about The Role Of Her Husband In The Yellow Wallpaper

Open Document